London Business Survey 2014 - London as a place to do business

The 2014 London Business Survey (LBS) is an innovative survey designed by the Office for National Statistics, on behalf of the London Enterprise Panel and the GLA. The survey collected information from a representative sample of private sector businesses in London in May-July 2014.

This dataset contains information on London as a business location and the factors affecting businesses corresponding with Section 2 of the London Business Survey 2014: Main Findings report.

Information is provided on:

How businesses rate London as a place to do business for a range of factors including: transport infrastructure, digital and communications infrastructure, affordable workspace, the cost of housing and staff with the appropriate skills

The expected impact on the business of leaving the EU (but not the single market)

How Greater London compares to cities outside the UK on availability of work visas for non–European employees

Satisfaction with local facilities including parks, sporting and recreational facilities, cultural activities, local amenities, and the safety and cleanliness of the local environment

Factors affecting businesses including the costs of energy and materials, taxes and business rates, government regulations, travel infrastructure, IT/connectivity

As with any survey, the 2014 LBS is based on a sample and as such is subject to variability in the results. Care should therefore be taken in interpreting the survey findings. For all estimates, lower and upper limits of 95% confidence intervals are provided in the data files to assist with interpretation. The LBS results represent the population of business units in London. A business unit is defined as a site/workplace, which may also be a head office if the head office is in London. It will be the whole business in the case of businesses which only have one site, or part of the business in the case of multi-site firms.

The results are presented by enterprise size band and industry sector.